Dawn Langley Simmons - The Two Lives of Baby Doe manuscript

Dawn Langley Simmons is a noted English author and biographer. Dawn Langley Simmons began her life as a boy named Gordon Langley Hall, having been born in England before World War II. In 1947, Simmons moved to Canada where she was a teacher on the Ojibway native reserve, where she wrote about this experience in one of her first novels, Me Papoose Sitter (1955). In her twenties, Gordon moved to the United States and first worked at the Nevada Daily Mail in Missouri before moving to New York where she became a biographer and friend of many wealthy people. While in New York, she worked as an editor at the Port Chester Daily Item and wrote many biographies on such notable people as Princess Margaret, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Lady Bird Johnson. After buying a house with a close friend who died two weeks after the purchase, Simmons inherited a small fortune and moved to Charleston, South Carolina. In 1968, she underwent one of the first sex-change operations and returned to the South as Dawn Langley Hall and soon married John-Paul Simmons in the first legal interracial marriage in South Carolina.

The information in this note is from the following sources:

“Dawn Langley Simmons.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, December 6, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Langley_Simmons.